CFP: The Transformative Power of Art: Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk and Christoph Schlingensief's participatory experiment Opera Village Africa, Courtauld Institute, London, Feb 2016
Robert Judd
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
February 5-6, 2016
Deadline: Nov 6, 2015
http://courtauld.ac.uk/event/the-transformative-power-of-art
SPEAKERS:
Prof John Deathridge (King's College London), Chris Dercon (Tate Modern), Prof Lydia Goehr (Columbia University, New York), Aino Laberenz (Opera Village Africa), Gregor Muir (ICA)
The aim of this conference is to explore Christoph Schlingensief's participatory art project Opera Village Africa against the backdrop of Richard Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. We wish to approach this topic from the perspective of multiple disciplines including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, history, musicology, philosophy, postcolonial studies and theatre studies.
The founding of the Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso is inextricably linked with Schlingensief's critical engagement with the writing and music of Richard Wagner, who served Schlingensief throughout his career as a touch-stone for a process of working through the heritage of the German past. The soundtrack to Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928) initially evoked Schlingensief's ambiguous fascination for Wagner. Schlingensief's Parsifal production for the Bayreuth Festival on which he collaborated with the conductor Pierre Boulez in 2004 became pivotal to his subsequent projects. Disillusioned about the elitism and inaccessibility of opera, Schlingensief desired to do justice to the young Wagner's anarchist ideas of a Gesamtkunstwerk that is accessible for everyone.
Did Schlingensief succeed in bringing Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk to life in the twenty-first century? This is the question our conference will address and, we hope, attempt to answer.
Abstracts are invited for presentations of 20-25 minutes followed by discussion. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief biography that explains your interest in this area of research to Sarah Hegenbart: sarah.hegenbart -at- courtauld.ac.uk by 6 November 2015.